MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Presentraining - The Blending of Presenting and Training

Last week was occupied in these parts by our all-company meeting. The two days of meetings and conferences brought up something I've been batting around in my head for a few weeks now: the gray, fuzzy line between presentations and training.

I'm defining a "presentation" as any talk that seeks to persuade its listeners about an opinion or fact, and "training" as any meeting that wants to teach its attendees something. Frequently, presentations also seek to teach. And more often than not, training must convince the student to care enough to learn. There are exceptions to the rule, as I've listed in the diagram below, but in reality, most times we stand up in front of a group, it's a presentraining. We have to convince and we have to teach.

This is why Presentation Zen has been on my must-read RSS feed for a while now. Black-and-white bullet points, whether in instructor-led training or e-learning, don't cut it. And in presentations, focusing on the two or three nuggets you want your listeners to walk away with is critical.

I live with one foot in each of these worlds, and I see instructional design and presentation design heading in convergent directions. I think they'll both make much faster headway the more they borrow from each other. What do you think - where do you see these two fields coming together, and where do you see them standing apart?

Is Learning 2.0 a long tail?

Tony Karrer has posted a very thought-provoking article about the Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis. It's an interesting corollary to the impact that Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0 has on our learning audiences. Tony says, in part:

The list of issues [in this article] represent what can truly be considered a crisis for corporate learning organizations.  It's a crisis born of the Long Tail and the Attention Economy. ... Corporate learning functions will either continue to focus on the front of the tail and an ever smaller portion of the total information needs of knowledge workers or will look to expand into the long tail.

I agree with what Tony is saying about the deep impact that today's attention requirements is having on training. Today's learner expects on-demand, the whole on-demand, and nothing but the on-demand training resources.

This means that today's training needs are spread out more - there's less need than ever for long training that covers everything and more and more need for short bursts of information that meet the learner's requirements at the moment.

But is that really a long tail? I know that Chris Anderson would argue that everything in a marketplace has a long tail, but I think that the office organization creates a limited marketplace. The tail is lengthening and flattening - as trainers, we're under demand to produce more and more training pieces that are faster and meet more specific needs - but I don't think that the tail is infinite. We've gone from a hamster tail to a mouse tail, but there's still an end to the tail. Our learners need training that meets their needs quickly and helps them in their job. But it's limited by the needs of their job, so I think there's a limit to those needs.

Just a small addendum (and I'm open to hearing otherwise if people think it's wrong) to a main point that I heartily agree with: The learning market is changing, and all of us are facing the challenge of meeting those changes or becoming irrelevant to our audience.

Is "Human Resources" an out-of-date name?

Recently, I and other bloggers have questioned recently whether we should use the term "human capital," or whether it's a de-humanizing term. Today, Seth Godin talks about "Marketing HR" and makes a similar case for the term "Human Resources."

He links the name "Human Resources" back to the factory days when people were just another cog in the machines and, therefore, needed to managed as such. He proposes that HR departments should be called "Talent" departments instead, and notes that some companies are already making such moves. (And my personal favorite, departments of "People.")

I had never made such a connection to the term "Human Resources" before. Maybe it's because the term "resources" can also be about the things that are being made available to us employees, not just how to use what we have to offer. Maybe it's because it feels much more natural, like - well, "natural resources" - than "human capital."

But on the other hand, names have power, and I'm all for anything that shakes up our assumptions a bit and puts our focus squarely on how we're impacting (and hopefully improving) the people in our organizations. Even if you don't want to go through the redtape of a department name change, maybe just a campaign reminder that "HR (or training) is about talent" will serve a suitable pants-kicking to wake people up a bit.

What's your company's training or HR department done lately to remind them and everyone else that they're there for the people and the talent in their organization?

A great way to celebrate Valentine's Day - and not just because it involves a Mr. Rogers reference

I wasn't planning to write anything Valentine's Day-specific today, but then Janet Clarey posted this excellent VDay thought. Check it out for a warm fuzzy and a great way to remember the important people:

Educators you’ve loved - on Valentine’s Day

ASTD's 2008 BEST awards are open for application

ASTD (the American Society for Training & Development) has announced the opening of their 2008 BEST awards for the leading companies in applying workplace learning throughout their organization and to best support their workplace goals.

Fill out this award application is a great project. Even if you're not confident in winning (or in our case, not eligible because we're a learning provider, which I pout about a lot), the application is still very useful. It's a great way to step back and get a widescreen perspective on your organization's learning programs and their implementation, effectiveness, and support.

The BEST web site
The application
Tips for maximizing your submission
Our story about the 2007 BEST winners

Employee orientation: Your most important training program

First impressions are quick to form and have a lasting, sometimes permanent, impact. That's why employee orientation is so important: it's not only the most important factor to get your newest paid resource up and running in all the right directions, it has a huge effect on the motivation and engagement of that new arrival.

Ask a Manager has posted a fantastic rundown of their new employee orientation program, including what information they cover. It's a set plan for every new arrival. Orientation doesn't have to be rebuilt from scratch every time - it should be a set schedule that's ready to be pulled out whenever a new person comes on board.

At MindLeaders, we use courses and time with managers and peers to create a blended orientation program. Some of the things that I'd add to this list:

• A tour of the offices, especially where to find goodies in the kitchens
• An overview of our product, including time to use it - regardless of what position they're starting in
• Information about our industry and competition
• How to get MIS help and other company communications

What other topics do you cover in your orientations? Is it time to dust off the orientation schedules within each department - or to build them?

Putting Second Life/virtual environments to good use

Virtual environments are an up-and-coming learning tool. And like all learning tools, they'll be invaluable in some training applications, best used with a blend of other tools to cover all of a topic's training needs.

Most of those applications are just beginning to be discovered or be feasible, but Tom Werner at Brandon Hall Research found an excellent example of using a virtual environment for a valuable training lesson. Even more surprising to me is that they found a great use of Second Life in particular, which  I think is even harder to pull off.

The training is for health care professionals who work with older patients. The virtual environment (this part is not Second Life-specific) simulates for the player the effects of aging, such as slower mobility and reduced eyesight, hearing, and dexterity. These kinds of lessons are perfect for virtual environments.

I think the Second Life-specific/public playing field part of this training is brilliant: the players experience Second Life with an elderly person avatar, to see how people treat them differently and how many objects are not made for someone of their age and build. It uses the larger game as a living social experiment.

Great thinking here! What training needs do you have that could be met by a Second Life or other virtual simulation?

One basic rule to making your training program successful

Overdeliver.

There are a few sites I really dig that speak well to training, even though they're not training-specific sites, like Presentation Zen for learning to build great training programs, and marketing sites for the crucial-but-sometimes-overlooked task of marketing training and training programs to their audiences, their audiences' managers, and the executive suite.

Seth Godin's post about Making Promises nearly made me shout "Amen!" at my desk. And even though he's talking about sales and marketing, try substituting a few words about the training program you're currently working on:

If you need to overpromise to make [people attend or managers/executives believe in the importance of the training], don't bother. It's not worth it.

The best way to generate word of mouth [about the new training program or knowledge management tool] is simple: overdeliver.

What's the most basic, business-strategy-centric need that this training program is going to meet? Tell your audiences about that. And then deliver it AND - deliver it AND make it easy, or AND show new ways you can put it use, or AND give the attendees something to take back to their desks that makes their days a little bit easier.

I think this is a great truism for life in general, not even just marketing: Make your promises carefully, and then overdeliver on them.

Generation Y's impact on training at UPS

Fortune Magazine has published a fascinating article about UPS revamping its training program to better suit Generation Y. (Via Tom Werner at Brandon Hall. They also have a video introduction here.) Here is one of the best concrete examples so far of how the new arrivals in the workforce are having an impact - in UPS's case, first on skyrocketing dropouts and injury rates, then on the pilot program of a complete re-engineering of their training program to deal with these issues.

I worked with a guy in college who also worked at a UPS shipping facility, and he showed me the book full of zip codes that he had to memorize for the job. He was tested on it constantly. Turns out such rote book study doesn't fly so well these days. As we've been seeing for a while now, the NextGen is demanding to see and do it for themselves, and they want to instantly know their results. My favorite line of the article:

Because the young people they're trying to train aren't just Generation Y, they're Generation Why?

That's got to be one of the best one-line descriptions of NextGen that I've seen yet.

But here's the thing that struck me as I read about the new training program that UPS had put together for their workers, one that includes lots of examples along with their quizzes, instant feedback in hard data and video recordings, full-scale simulations and practice runs: that sounds like excellent training for everyone, regardless of generation.

The training innovations that Generation Y are demanding are good innovations that are resulting in better training. Maybe the real difference with Generation Y isn't about their training needs, but because they're demanding it rather than accepting the training that's given to them.

Writing learning objectives for the right audience

I read today a long, well-researched, well-thought-out post from from Sims Learning Connections about Writing Learning Objectives. It reminded me of a conversation I had at Learning 2007 with a small group of workplace trainers. We were discussing a completely different topic, but it turned out that 2 or 3 of them had surveyed their audiences about their training and had hit the same surprising theme: one of the things that learners panned most universally were learning objectives. They said that the learning objectives did them as students no good at all; they seemed to be there for the sake of the teacher, not the learner.

So are learning objectives worth our time and effort?

I think the article by Will at Work on the New Taxonomy for Learning Objectives is headed in the right direction. We're making a mistake when we try to write singular objectives for our training. Our objectives as trainers and instructional designers are different than our objectives as CLOs or front-line managers and are different than our objectives as learners. We should never present an objective written for one listener to another - they won't care.

• Trainers and instructional designers need objectives to tell them what the training must cover.
• Managers and executives need objectives to tell them what business purpose and strategy the training is going to help fulfill.
• Learners need objectives to tell them why this applies to their jobs and what they should be looking to take away from the training session.
• And those of us who are building the training programs have to keep all three of these sewn together like battle plans.

What would you like to see in the learning objectives of the next training program you're involved in?